Battery based electric vehicles of today and tomorrow.

[drssg]

Thanks for sharing that link. My driving interest in EV's is the autopilot feature features. ...

Autopilot features are a separate subject from EVs. Mercedes and Cadillac have there own version, and there are probably others by now. Tesla has definitely hyped it much more than anyone else. They also seem to make the news more for crashing on autopilot.

I read an article a while back comparing the Tesla and Mercedes version. Mercedes will let the car swim around within the lane a bit, whereas Tesla keeps the car straight as an arrow down the center of the lane. The Mercedes functionality is by design to help prevent the driver from being too inattentive to what the car is doing.

I think too many Tesla owners BELIEVE that their car has a true autopilot feature. It's really more of an enhanced cruise control.

If you haven't yet, you'd probably enjoy doing a test drive of a Tesla. They are fairly open to it, even if you aren't seriously considering buying one in the near term.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

Autopilot features are a separate subject from EVs. Mercedes and Cadillac have there own version, and there are probably others by now. Tesla has definitely hyped it much more than anyone else. They also seem to make the news more for crashing on autopilot.

I read an article a while back comparing the Tesla and Mercedes version. Mercedes will let the car swim around within the lane a bit, whereas Tesla keeps the car straight as an arrow down the center of the lane. The Mercedes functionality is by design to help prevent the driver from being too inattentive to what the car is doing.

I think too many Tesla owners BELIEVE that their car has a true autopilot feature. It's really more of an enhanced cruise control.

If you haven't yet, you'd probably enjoy doing a test drive of a Tesla. They are fairly open to it, even if you aren't seriously considering buying one in the near term.

What really got me to thinking about self driving features were the Subara Eyesight self driving ads a few years ago with the lane keeping and automatic braking. On a wild hair some 3 years ago I dropped my wife off at work at 7 am on a Saturday and drove straight to Clarksville TN to look Subaru's for the first time because of the Eyesight ads. I was impressed but did not drive one because of the $30K price tag but was sold on getting a Subaru so before I left the parking lot I got on Craigslist looking for a used one to get my feet wet in ownership. I found a 2010 Forester Base model in Nashville with 105K miles but just had the 105K PM done including new head gaskets. I really was not wanting to drive to Nashville but the guy cut the price to $6K to get me to do the drive. The car drove well but the cloth interior was dirty and stained. I left $1600 with the seller and went back next week and picked it up.

At that time I had never seen a Tesla or heard of Elon Musk but that changed as I spend about 100 hours learning about the future of self driving cars. I soon realized the days of gas and diesel cars were numbered 10 years down the road. The more I learned about Elon Musk the more I wanted to own a Telsa but $$$ is a factor hard to ignore turning 70 soon and signing up for SS soon with two in college. I picked up the 2016 Nissan Leaf with a dying battery nearly a year ago to get my feet in the EV world and that has worked out well. I now see 50/50 odds for Nissan's future in the automotive industry.

After my accident a couple years ago which did not put anyone in the hospital I realized vehicle that could respond faster than a human could reduce my risk of a premature death on a highway. The future should be exciting.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

From Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace & Jim Erickson


During the summer of 1977, Gates often went out at 3:00 a.m. after hours of programming and drove around for an hour with his friend Chris Larson. One of his favorite roads was a narrow, twisting two-lane ribbon of highway a few miles east of town off Interstate 40 that led to an abandoned cement plant. Here, the finely tuned engine of the green Porsche could often be heard whining into the desert night as Gates smoothly negotiated one curve after another with each high-pitched shift of gears. On one of these wild summer rides with Larson, however, Gates did not maintain control. He spun out, and the Porsche crashed into a dirt embankment. "The way Chris described it," said Steve Wood, "they were going about 120 miles an hour [forward] and then they were going 120 sideways." Neither Gates nor Larson was injured, and there was only minor damage to the car.

Larson was Gates’ partner again on late-night shenanigans at a road construction site east of Albuquerque in the Sandia foothills, where unsuspecting workers would leave the keys in the heavy equipment when they went home for the day. Gates and Larson would sneak into the site, and by trial and error they learned to operate the complex machinery and drive it around the site. Usually, it was by error. Gates once came within a few inches of backing over his Porsche with a bulldozer. After they mastered the machinery, there was the usual friendly competition. One night, Gates and Larson held a bulldozer race, engines revving, stacks belching black smoke, determined to find out whose machine was faster. Neither would claim to be the winner. The bulldozer race became part of Microsoft folklore.

Was this before or after gates stole the code from xerox to “create” windows?

 

[cqaigy2]

Was this before or after gates stole the code from xerox to “create” windows?

Or OS2 from IBM.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Or OS2 from IBM.

I used to use os2 and the xerox star system.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

Are Radioactive Diamond Batteries a Cure for Nuclear Waste? | WIRED

I first read this from a different source and called it BS but as usual Wired dove into the science behind it. It does make sense for space research since solar panels would not be required. It is still a research project today but it potential could be huge.

 

[atomchaser]

I used to use os2 and the xerox star system.

As I recall, Gates got a contract with IBM for the operating system for the original PC. The only problem was he didn't actually have an operating system. He bought the rights to an operating system called QDOS from a computer hobbyist who wrote it for some small amount of money and renamed it MSDOS for sale to IBM. QDOS stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System"

 

[atomchaser]

Are Radioactive Diamond Batteries a Cure for Nuclear Waste? | WIRED

I first read this from a different source and called it BS but as usual Wired dove into the science behind it. It does make sense for space research since solar panels would not be required. It is still a research project today but it potential could be huge.

Radioisotope based batteries have been around for a long time. While they work well for critical applications like space probes and critical high-dollar systems, the cost and potential licensing issues make them impractical for consumer type applications. Even the big RTGs on space probes like Cassini only put out a couple hundred watts and use a lot more radioactive material to do it then the NRC would ever let an individual person to have.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

As I recall, Gates got a contract with IBM for the operating system for the original PC. The only problem was he didn't actually have an operating system. He bought the rights to an operating system called QDOS from a computer hobbyist who wrote it for some small amount of money and renamed it MSDOS for sale to IBM. QDOS stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System"

It may be a false memory by now but I remember it being $50K for DOS standing for Disk Operating System.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

As I recall, Gates got a contract with IBM for the operating system for the original PC. The only problem was he didn't actually have an operating system. He bought the rights to an operating system called QDOS from a computer hobbyist who wrote it for some small amount of money and renamed it MSDOS for sale to IBM. QDOS stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System"

I thought it was DRDOS. But that might have been another one. The first windows was an add on application that ran on DOS. I remember the first time I saw it I thought it was stupid, very clunky, didn’t do much.